Ivanti gives IT a voice in patient care

Health care providers are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to improve quality of care and patient safety, amid challenges posed by mergers and tightening budgets.

Technology plays a key role in this mission. Doctors, nurses, and support staff require anytime access to software and applications to quickly diagnose and treat patients, and manage their long-term care.

One such provider, SCL Health, serves patients in Colorado, Kansas, and Montana. This regional network of hospitals and clinics specializes in heart care, orthopedics, cancer care, women’s health resources and more.

In 2011, SCL Health merged two organizations, both with their own IT systems and service delivery operations. Seeing an opportunity to consolidate and help their IT team quickly respond to and resolve issues, SCL Health turned to Ivanti.

Thanks to Ivanti Service Manager, SCL Health is eliminating errors that could lead to costly hardware and software downtime.

“If you have systems that are unreliable and providers are stressed, there’s a risk that this could translate into a negative experience for the patient,” said Amy Yankovich, Director of Service Operations and Service Management for SCL Health. “It’s imperative to reduce outages to ensure patient safety and satisfaction.”

Yankovich and her team work closely with SCL Health’s High Reliability Organization to prioritize the tools doctors and nurses need to deliver reliable patient care.

“We pulled their stories into why change management is critical for IT,” said Yankovich.

SCL Health’s IT team is benefiting from training on the finer principles of reliable care and how human error can jeopardize this goal.

“Our teams at every level respect the process and understand that it is a safety mechanism for us to protect our systems and our patients,” said Yankovich.

Thanks to Ivanti Service Manager, SCL Health is seeing improvements in their associate engagement survey scores for change management. Their tracked-change volume more than doubled and their change success rate improved by 33 percent.

“Ivanti Service Manager is like a medical record for a patient,” said Yankovich. “We need a detailed record about our systems, applications, and services so we can understand the health of IT across our organization.”

Because of her team’s investment in this process, Yankovich says they’re able to use their post-implementation review process to capture data when changes don’t go as expected.

“We’re developing reports to share these learnings across out teams. We are confident this will further improve our overall change success rates for our organization,” she said.

That was just the beginning. IT processes, staff, and tools are fully in tune with SCL Health’s priority on high-reliability health care. IT now has a place at the table in daily briefings and safety huddles to share information about important safety issues.

Ivanti's dashboard and reporting technology is giving SCL Health more visibility into unplanned outages and other issues that could impact care.

“Through realizing these processes in a centralized solution, we’ve seen a reduction in our monthly average volume of incidents of 18 percent, and we’ve only just begun,” said Yankovich.

As a result of Ivanti solutions, the IT team at SCL Health is experiencing success with problem management, helping them achieve SLAs, resolve incidents faster, and finding solutions to long-term problems.

“For example, we can see if a particular enabling service, such as desktop virtualization, is a top cause of outages and work with our business partners to re-evaluate how we manage that service,” said Yankovich. “We can deliver higher quality outcomes without increasing costs. When issues do occur, we get the user back to work faster.”

Executives are taking notice as well.

“Our CIO has embraced service management as a strategic initiative,” said Yankovich. “Senior leadership sees the value and opportunity we have to further increase our value to the business as we manage our services against metrics that make sense for that service.”

Instead of being viewed as just hardware and software, the IT team at SCL Health is using the Ivanti Configuration Management Database to align its service portfolio with business functions, such as electronic medical records, laboratory services, and payroll services.

“As we implement these into Ivanti, teams will be even more effective and our leadership will have the data needed to make informed, strategic decisions as they relate to our services,” said Yankovich. “We went from being the IT guys in the basement to being a true partner in patient safety. It changed the conversation.”

By analyzing historical data with Ivanti, Yankovich’s team discovered that change activity and incidents tend to spike in late fall. SCL Health’s leadership team identified the root cause: an end-of-year push for IT projects before funding expired, coupled with time-off requests around the holidays. With insight from Ivanti solutions, they're now able to mitigate the risk and change behavior.

“For the first time, we’re thinking of service management as a true solution, not just a ticketing concept,” said Yankovich.

SCL Health has discovered Service Manager capabilities beyond IT. Their Human Resources Service Center now uses Ivanti to track employee inquiries about payroll and benefits and Ivanti solutions are being used to help fill last-minute nursing shortages.

“Conversations are happening about the value of being able to leverage a shared solution to track their services,” said Yankovich.

SCL Health is now looking at implementing Ivanti’s IT asset management solutions to help them track, manage, and optimizie their hardware and software.

Read more about SCL Health's success with Ivanti and click below to learn more about our enterprise-grade IT service management solutions.